Queering Being in the Colonial Pueblo de San Fernando de Omoa, Honduras

Abstract Discussion of the archaeological materiality of the town that grew up around a new Spanish Caribbean fort in 18th-century Honduras, San Fernando de Omoa, demonstrates how to queer being in such a time and place. Omoa was an unplanned commercial entrepôt, occupied by a population almost entirely of partial African descent, that grew up around a rigidly planned and hierarchical fortress. Omoa’s documentary and artifactual remains can either be assigned to a preexisting framework of orderly colonial norms or be seen, as the documentary record demonstrates, as traces of a site where difference was in particular question and authorities challenged to maintain control. Material culture that might otherwise be read as normative and was described by residents of the town as required for “decency,” disturbed the order of things as much as the people of Omoa disturbed order through their crossing of racialized and gender hierarchies.